Bergen, Camden counties must provide more bilingual ballots

Eight of New Jersey’s 21 counties will have to provide voting assistance such as bilingual ballots because they have concentrations of people with limited English comprehension, the federal government announced today.

In New Jersey, that applies for more than 535,000 Hispanics in Bergen, Camden, Cumberland, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Passaic and Union counties, as well as for nearly 62,000 Koreans in Bergen County. Not all of them have limited English proficiency, but enough in those groups do to trigger the aid under the Voting Rights Act.

The help in Camden County and for Koreans in Bergen County is a new requirement; the others are continuations of assistance required to be provided in the past. Generally speaking, it means providing forms, instructions and ballots in languages other than English.

Every 10 years, under the Voting Rights Act, U.S. Census Bureau officials assess whether a state or political subdivision must provide language assistance to a portion of the population.

A group qualifies if more than 5 percent of voting age citizens are members of a single-language minority group and don’t speak or understand English adequately enough to participate in elections, or if that group includes more than 10,000 people.